17.02.2012

In the House of the Hangman 850

I’M NOT

WRITING

A

GROCERY LIST

THIS

IS

PURE WAR – lambs with five legs, horned humans, leviathans, mermaids and – “monstro” (I show) – a mother, with the unconscious force of her imagination, may imprint the foetus in her womb – startled by a horse, she might give birth to a horse-headed child. Your sweaty party dress and my sweaty party dress lasted a few minutes until the tomato was gone some day they will disambiguate you our dinosaurs ruled. Martin Amis, Nigel Thrift, Jussi Parikka. Closer in comparative evolution to red bread mold than the fruit fly is / pyramid schemes make us sad. “We have seen the ghost of René Guénon, cadaverous & topped with a fez (like Boris Karloff as Ardis Bey in The Mummy) leading a Funereal Thanatosis Noise band in blackfly-chants through the world of the Consensus. Anyone who can read history with both hemispheres knows that a world comes to an end every instant. And every instant also gives birth to a world – a present in which all impossibilities are renewed in one presential hologrammatical psychomantric gesture.” It’s an experiential trap street — an infinite loop — a deliberate cartographic error trapping the driver in a series of U-turns, because the government is jamming all nearby signals. He looks like a recombo DNA project aimed at tailoring people for high-speed burrowing … The man who stood blinking now in the doorway behind them, the blanket draping one shoulder like a cape, seemed to have been designed in a wind tunnel. His ears were very small, plastered flat against his narrow skull, and his large front teeth, revealed in something that wasn’t quite a smile, were canted sharply backward. He wore an ancient tweed jacket and held a handgun of some kind in his left hand. He peered at them, blinked, and dropped the gun into a jacket pocket. “My first memory is of the brightness of light ... light all around. I was sitting among pillows on a quilt on the ground ...very large white pillows ...” The zipper is broken open. Maybe the broken zipper is my mouth. A fake bird called Broken Zipper Wing. This could be a naturally beautiful. I could be a homeless pygmy goat, gnawing fallen apples by the side of the road. I could be learning how to moonwalk from an online tutorial. Last month saw dozens of toys, from teddy bears to Lego figurines, standing out in the snow of a Siberian city with banners complaining about corruption and electoral malpractice. Why doesn’t Hello Kitty have a mouth? Because Hello Kitty is the ghost of surplus value. Or, as Evan Calder Williams argues in a post about laughter and realism, “What we need now is a better sense of the real divide to be drawn, between the realism effect and affective realism, between what we’ve inherited as the ‘look’ of realism and what actually nails down and pins, like a shaking butterfly of the present, the feel of our historical moment.” That is, what Hello Kitty brings to the table is a metonymic capacity to evoke the amorphous ideas that currently structure the social whole.

[Note: Sources: JBR, but see Catherine Meng, I’m Not Writing Pure War This Is A Grocery List, at Dusie; Marina Warner, “monsters, magic and miracles”, at Times Literary Supplement, 6 Feb 012 (A review of Wes Williams, MONSTERS AND THEIR MEANINGS IN EARLY MODERN CULTURE: Mighty magic); CA Conrad, “Anoint Thyself”, at Dusie 11; JBR (the last three authors whose names showed up in my Google Reader; Amis, humorously enough, because he’s the author of the nonfiction Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict’s Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines); Dana Teen Lomax, “Lullaby”, in Rx, at Dusie 11; Hakim Bey, as quoted in Adam Robbert, “Reasons to like Hakim Bey”, at Knowledge Ecology, 16 Feb 012; Geoff Manaugh, as quoted in Jacob Sloan, “Security By Bending GPS Geography”, at Disinformation, 16 February 2012; William Gibson, Neuromancer, as quoted in Brian Joseph Davis, The Composites, 14 Feb 012; Georgia O’Keefe, epigraph to Marthe Read, zaum alliterations, at Dusie 11; Juliet Cook, “Semi-Extraneous Consort”, in Soft Foam, at Dusie 11; Cathy Davidson, as Quoted in Alex Reid, “the professorial user interface”, at alex reid/digital digs, 16 Feb 012; a Guardian article, as quoted in Jacob Sloan, “Toy Protest Banned In Russia”, at Disinformation, 16 Feb 012 (“Now a petition to hold another protest featuring 100 Kinder Surprise toys, 100 Lego people, 20 model soldiers, 15 soft toys and 10 toy cars has been rejected because the toys have been deemed not to be ‘citizens of Russia’”); Ben Gabriel, “I Have No Mouth but I Must Scream”, at The New Inquiry, 16 Feb 012]